Secondary Sources: Veterans’ Jobs, Finance Competition, Deadly Growth

–Veterans’ Jobs: The Labor Department has some interesting charts on veterans in the labor force. “In August 2011, about 3.0 million veterans, or 14 percent of the total, reported having a service-connected disability. (Some veterans did not report whether they had a service-connected disability.) Regardless of period of service, many veterans with a service-connected disability worked in the public sector. In August 2011, 34 percent of employed veterans with a disability worked in federal, state, or local government, compared with 19 percent of veterans with no disability and 14 percent of nonveterans. About 18 percent of employed veterans with a disability worked for the federal government, compared with 6 percent of veterans with no disability and 2 percent of nonveterans.”

–Finance Competition: Raghuram Rajan says that making finance less competitive isn’t the right way to reduce risk. “Competition makes it harder to make money, and thus depletes the future rents (and stock prices) of the incompetent. In an ordinary industry, incompetent firms (and their employees) would be forced to exit. In the financial sector, the incompetent take on more risk, hoping to hit the jackpot, even while the regulator protects them by deeming them too systemically important to fail. Instead of abandoning competition and giving banks protected monopolies once again, the public would be better served by making it easier to close banks when they get into trouble. Instead of making banking boring, let us make it a normal industry, susceptible to destruction in the face of creativity.”

–Deadly Growth:Mark Buchanan asks whether growth could kill us. “In the absence of a miraculous decoupling, we’re faced with a daunting prospect. In the West, our economies are designed around growth and would collapse without it. Slowing growth, if and when it happens, will require an attendant transformation of the very foundations of economic organization — a transformation of a kind that no one can now honestly imagine. The few thinkers who have tried — such as economist Herman Daly — have generally been ignored by the mainstream. Perhaps a few supersmart economists out there at places like Harvard, Chicago and MIT are at work now, at least part time, trying to imagine a future beyond growth, thinking about how we might prepare ourselves and organize our economies differently. I hope so.”

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